The Cat Dancers

40

Mary Ellen Goode was still smiling when Cam walked into the ranger station the next morning. The day had dawned bright and clear with about a foot and a half of snow on the ground and the temperature at a sinus-clearing ten degrees. The county roads had been scraped and sanded, so he’d made decent time getting over to the ranger station. He’d put on his old deputy’s hat and mirrored sunglasses against all the glare, and Mary Ellen told him with a perfectly straight face that no one would ever make him for a cop.

She offered coffee, which he accepted gratefully. He explained the note and the phone number, and her eyebrows went up.

“That’s the number for my Park Service cell phone,” she said. “But it’s right over-” She started looking around her desk. “Well, it was right here. This is the charger for it.”

“Whoever left the note knew who owned the phone, then,” he said. He wondered if it was someone in this office. He explained about the initials on the note.

“I don’t like the sound of that at all,” she said, frowning.

“Let me ask you this: If tracks were made by a large animal in the snow, and then there was more snow, and then a crust of sleet froze over all of that, could someone still excavate those tracks?”

She stared at him for a moment. “I couldn’t, but we have a ranger on staff who maybe could.”

An hour later, they were back at Cam’s cabin. A long, tall, gaunt ranger who looked uncannily like Abraham Lincoln was down on hands and knees on Cam’s front porch, scraping gently at the snow with a woodworker’s two-handled draw knife. Cam and Mary Ellen, trying to ignore the cold, watched from the doorway.

“Normally,” the ranger said, “the prints would simply fill up, but you said you saw an ice film. That’s what I’m looking for. How deep would you say the snow was when the prints were made?”

“A dusting of blown snow,” Cam said. “Maybe half an inch deep, max.” Everyone’s breath was making puffs of condensation in the frigid air, and now the ranger shifted to a paintbrush as he continued to mine his way down through the snow along a three-foot-long stretch outside of the area where Cam and the dogs had trampled the snow. Two pairs of German shepherd ears were silhouetted in one of the front windows.

“Well, this may all be for nothing if that layer of ice-wait one. Here we go. Here we go.”

The ranger shifted from the big paintbrush to a much smaller and finer brush and began to remove snow across the line of his original shallow trench. As he did so, the outline of a paw print began to emerge.

Mary Ellen looked over his shoulder and whistled quietly. “That’s a big bastard,” she said.

“Yeah, I’d say so,” the ranger replied, clearing away the remaining snow almost grain by grain until he had the entire print revealed. Then he brought out a spray can from his field kit and sprayed the entire depression. “It’s a silicone-based compound,” he said. “Solidifies on cold contact.” The material was barely tinted yellow, but it held enough color that the print was thrown into clear relief. This time, Cam could see the tops of claw marks, and it wasn’t a happy sight. The ranger sat back on his haunches. “Now that,” he declared, “is a large cat. Panther, from the size of it.” He laid down another coat of varnish, waited a moment, and did it again.

“And not declawed,” Mary Ellen commented.

“Yeah,” the ranger said, getting a camera out of his pack. He fired off several pictures from different angles, then swore, fished out a ruler, laid it down by the track, and did it all again. The print looked to Cam to be about ten inches across.

“Are there more?” the ranger asked.

“There was a line all the way across this porch,” Cam said. “The dogs came in here by the door and messed stuff up, which is why I had you start in the middle of the porch. There’s more on that porch over there.”

The ranger nodded and began to extend his trench in the snow. “I need one, preferably two more to get an estimate of stride length. This’ll take awhile.”

The dogs were getting antsy inside the cabin, so Cam went back in, and Mary Ellen followed. She greeted both dogs affectionately and they returned her favor.

“Great shepherds,” she said. “Let me guess: This one’s business and this one’s pleasure?”

“Right you are,” Cam said. “Although the black one can do business if he has to. Mostly, he just scares people by looking at them.”

“Works for me,” she said. “How’d they react to that thing being out there on the front porch?”

“Not bravely,” he replied.

“Smart dogs,” she said, shaking off her coat now she was inside the warm cabin. She had a field belt on under her bulky Park Service coat, complete with what looked like a Glock. She saw him looking. “I don’t leave home or the office without it,” she said. “Ever since…”

“Copy that,” he said. He went into the kitchen to crank up the coffeepot.

“So tell me, Lieutenant, what’s really brought you out here to our neck of the woods? You show up, telling tall tales about cat dancers, somebody steals my phone, makes an appointment he doesn’t keep, and now we have the first real sign of a mountain lion in thirty years.”

He pulled over a kitchen chair and sat down to wait for the coffee to percolate. She stayed over by the woodstove, nonchalantly trying to warm her buns and her hands at the same time. They both heard the ranger out front say “Yes!” as he found another track.

Cam stared down at the table for a long moment while he tried to figure out how much to tell her. She didn’t bug him. “Did you guys hear about those executions that showed up on the Web?” he asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was all over the LE networks. I saw one of the videos.”

“That happened in our neck of the woods, and I’m working the whodunit.”

“All by yourself?”

He smiled. Smart girl, he thought. “For the moment,” he said. “We might have a wee bit of federal help.”

“Ah,” she said. “So there’s one game for your federal friends and another one for the sheriff’s edification?”

“Something like that,” he said. He wasn’t willing to broach the possibility that there were vigilantes involved.

“And didn’t you have a judge get herself blown up down there in Triboro recently?” she asked. “Was that related?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Truth is, we really don’t know, but we’re keeping our options open. She was the judge who let the two fryees loose on a technicality.”

She gave him a shrewd look from the other side of the room. “Liberal judge lets them go, they get rounded up by a person or persons unknown and end up in an electric chair?” she said.

“They killed the wife and daughter of a Duke Energy scientist in a holdup. They walked because of a police screwup. Then said scientist goes off the grid, followed by the two mopes doing a star turn in the chair. He’d been a Ranger back in the army. So…”

“And you guys think he did the judge, too?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. She was getting too close to figuring out what he was really investigating. “Like I said, it’s early days, and the feds have their own theories-as usual.”

“Lest we forget, Park Service is federal, too,” she said. “And that’s not an answer. We’re not necessarily the enemy, Lieutenant.”

He was saved by the percolator, which started making gasping noises. He got up and poured coffee into three cups. He handed one to her and then took one out to the ranger, who had uncovered a second track and was beginning to dust a third. She joined him in the doorway, stirring some sugar into her coffee. “How big, Larry?”

“Two meters plus,” the ranger said, sitting back on his haunches and blowing on the hot coffee between sips. “Can’t estimate weight on wooden floorboards like this, but at that stride length, it has to be seventy, eighty kilos. Big effing cat. This third impression is not very good, so I’m going to work the dirt just off the porch.”

“And what the hell was that thing doing here?” Cam asked.

“You let those dogs run around?” Mary Ellen asked.

Cam nodded.

“Then that’s probably what it was hunting,” she said. “A panther this big would definitely not be afraid of a couple of dogs. Slap, slap, chow time.”

Larry had moved off the porch and was excavating the snow at the end of the building. All scrunched up down in the snow, he looked like a grounded stork. Cam went back inside. “So maybe there is something to your cat dancer story,” she said. “But what’s the tie to what you’re investigating?”

He smiled at her. “I’m not sure there is one. Just something some guy mentioned in the course of our asking questions, so here I am. Basic follow-up. It’s what we do when we’re clueless. There probably is no tie.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “My doctorate’s in animal science,” she said. “My specialty happens to be bears, not big cats. These prints will make for some interesting discussions down at the tavern. But then we’re going to have to prove you didn’t fake them, of course. You know, Bigfoot Two. Sasquatch comes to the Smokies.”

“Knock yourself out,” he said. “It’s not like I’m looking for a feature story in the Enquirer. You’ve basically answered my questions.”

She nodded at him with a faintly triumphant smile. Shit, he thought. She just mouse-trapped me. Dr. Smiley. He grinned at her. “Okay. Nicely done.”

“Thank you. And the real story is?”

It was his turn to surprise her. “I can’t tell you anything else about this investigation,” he said. “It’s that sensitive, okay?”

She blinked. He stared at her until she got it. “Oh,” she said. “Internal problem.”

“I never said that, and that’s where we need to leave it,” he replied. “No offense intended.”

“None taken. How can we help?”

“Cat dancers,” he said. “Anything you can tease out of the local woodwork about that term might help. I’ll take rumors, hearsay, gossip, all the way to names and addresses. Anything.”

“You really are nowhere on this, aren’t you,” she said. “Okay, I’ll get the guys to ask around.” She thought for a moment. “At least now we seem to have the requisite cat.”